The biggest issue with nuclear isn't safety (at least in the G20). The biggest issue is development and deployment time. If we started a massive nuclear plant building program, the first plants would be coming on-line in 15 to 20 years. In the meantime we will have had to build solar, wind, and hydro to fill in the gap. Long term, nuclear can be part of the mix. But energy solutions need to arrive faster than nuclear can.

So exactly who is paying you Anonymous Cowards to claim it will just be moved to NOAA? There's no evidence to that effect, and plenty of statements from Lord Trump and his mouthpieces to indicate that no money will be spent on climate change research in the future.

No, it doesn't. It just shuts it down.

You apparently didn't notice that Trump was elected by a minority of the voters, the Republicans in the House of Representatives were elected by a minority of the voters, and the Republicans in the Senate were elected by a minority of the voters.

It's not surprising. Authoritarians rarely have much regard for the will of the majority. But minority rule can't last for long. The real majority will have its way, one way or another.

Welcome to permanent minority status, white man. You'd better hope the majority doesn't treat you as badly as you treated them when you had power

You do realize that most of what you posted is a lie, right? Of course you do. Lying is what you do.

The earth has been cooler for the entire period during which anything resembling human beings evolved. Antarctica wasn't in its current position when it was warmer than it is now. And, without human carbon releases the planet maintains a relatively temperate climate over long periods of time through the action of the carbonate-silicate cycle. Of course when you dig up half a billion years worth of stored organic carbon and burn in in a century, the carbonate-silicate cycle ain't gonna fix that.

And of course, continuing to release more CO2, that's your fault, not mine.

NASA is doing climate research because 4 decades of political leaders decided NASA should be doing climate research. If you are deluded enough to think Trump is just going to move things around to NOAA rather than eliminating inconvenient research, you deserve what you get. Good luck with that.

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

Because in a system that allocates GPA fairly (where the average GPA is 2 and the standard deviation is 1) a single grade point in a single class is insignificant, so the difference between an A and a B is 0.02 in you final GPA

That's the problem with people who think that knowing a subject makes it possible to get every answer correct. Some of the best courses I took had questions on exams that were not possible to answer correctly without access to a supercomputer and a few hundred CPU months, where the instructor was looking for depth of knowledge and technique rather than "the right answer". It makes me wonder if those that advocate for absolute grading have ever had to do anything difficult in their lives. Or ever considered that two exams on exactly the same material could have different difficulties.

It's also not true that scores are proportional to knowledge. An obvious example is the multiple choice, multiple answer test where negative scores are quite possible.

Typically I design upper division exams for an average of 50%. I could easily design for 84% "standard," but it would tell me and my students less, because there would be less distinction at the upper end. It would be more difficult for students to know what they do and don't understand well. Yet you would have me punish my students for making the people with As work a little harder and maybe learn a little more.

The problem is that grades are arbitrary. The instructor defines them, and the universities and the students pressure instructors to give higher grades in lower division courses. Instead of arbitrary grades, assign lower division grades by quintile. Top 20% A, Bottom 20% F. It's enough to maintain student competition, gets rid of the "easy graders". For higher division, drop the lowest grades, with F being giving to a small percentage at the option of the instructor. Mid division would be ABCD quartiles. Upper division ABC. Graduate AB.

If it's possible for a student to get a degree by taking only "easy" courses, that's a problem with the design of the major curriculum.

Given that about 1% of gas and diesel powered vehicles have a fire in their lifetime, I'm not very concerned about 1 in 6300.

You UK drivers are amateurs when it comes to fire. We merkins have 152,000 a year.

That doesn't necessarily make them more dangerous. I have a friend who lost a home to a fire that started in the engine compartment of a car in the garage. It was probably a leaky fuel line dripping onto a hot engine component. In your reconing is that an internal or an external heat source? Of order half a dozen car fires happen during a typical commute day on SF bay area freeways, and that's not counting the fires that start because of collisions.

It doesn't seem that likely that Teslas are any more fire prone than any other car. The rates for gasoline cars have about one serious (i.e. reported to police) fire per 18 million miles. If the average car goes 180K miles, that's about 1% that go up in flames at some point. The average Tesla hasn't gone that far, and I don't know what the fleet mileage is, but I'll be surprised if they are that flammable.

The real security concern with VMs is duplication ... if you clone a bunch of VMs but they start with the same entropy pool, then generate an SSL cert after clone, the other SSL certs will be easily predicted.

Yeah, I encountered that the other day. Built a VM, took a snapshot, did some stuff, reverted, did the same stuff. I was testing a procedure doc I was writing. Part of the procedure was creating an SSL cert, and I got an identical one on both attempts. That seems a little fishy to me; I would expect the certs to be (by the standards of cryptography) very similar, not identical. With that said, I didn't actually generate the cert myself, I ran a script (which I didn't write) to do it. The script might be using the same random seed or something. Or it could be a characteristic of moznss.

Feeling good about your EC2 instances, eh?

No shit. It might be worthwhile to use your desktop or some other hardware you control to seed your VM's PRNG with higher-quality entropy. That way, you should at least be able to avoid collisions with other VMs on the same hardware.